Tag Archives: Internet

I’ve been looking at instant messaging and chat software lately. Briefly stated, I connect to Jabber and IRC networks from at least three different computers. I don’t like having to sign in and out on different machines. One of the nice features about Jabber (XMPP) is that I can have clients signing in from all over the place and it will automatically route messages to the active one. If the clients are smart enough, that is.

Gajim

I have been using Gajim as my primary chat client for some time now. It has a good feature set, but has had a history of being a bit buggy for me. It used to have issues when starting up: sometimes it would try to fire up two copies of itself. It still has a bug when being fired up from a terminal: if you run gajim & exit, it will simply die. You have to wait a few seconds to close the terminal you launched it from. It has also had issues with failing to reconnect properly after a dropped network connection and generating spurious “resource already in use” errors. Upgrades sometimes fix bugs, and sometimes introduce them.

The latest one I’ve been dealing with is its auto-idle support. Sometimes it will fail to recognize that I am back at the machine. Even weirder, sometimes it will set one of my accounts to available status, but not the other.

So much for my complaints about Gajim; it also has some good sides. It has excellent multi-account support. You can have it present your multiple accounts as separate sections in the roster, or you can have them merged. Then, say, all your contacts in a group called Friends will be listed together, regardless of which account you use to contact them.

The Jabber protocol (XMPP) permits you to connect from multiple clients. Each client specifies a numeric priority for its connection. When someone sends you a message, it will be sent to the connection with the highest priority. The obvious feature, then, is to lower your priority when you are away (or auto-away due to being idle), so that you always get IMs at the device you are actively using. Gajim supports this via letting you specify timeouts that get you into different away states, and using the advanced configuration editor, you can also set the priority that each state goes to. So, if Gajim actually recognized your idleness correctly, this would be great.

I do also have AIM and MSN accounts which I use rarely. I run Jabber gateways to each of these on my server, so there is no need for me to use a multiprotocol client. That also is nice because then I can use a simple Jabber client on my phone, laptop, whatever and see all my contacts.

Psi is another single-protocol Jabber client, and like Gajim, it runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Psi has a nicer GUI than Gajim, and is more stable. It is not quite as featureful, and one huge omission is that it doesn’t support dropping priority on auto-away (though it, weirdly, does support a dropped priority when you manually set yourself away).

Psi doesn’t support account merging, so it always shows my contacts from one account separately from those from another. I like having the option in Gajim.

There is a fork of Psi known variously as psi-dev or psi-plus or Psi+. It adds that missing priority feature and some others. Unfortunately, I’ve had it crash on me several times. Not only that, but the documentation, wiki, bug tracker, everything is available only in Russian. That is not very helpful to me, unfortunately. Psi+ still doesn’t support account merging.

Both branches of Psi support media calling.

Kopete

Kopete is a KDE multiprotocol instant messenger client. I gave it only about 10 minutes of time because it is far from meeting my needs. It doesn’t support adjustable priorities that I can tell. It also doesn’t support XMPP service discovery, which is used to do things like establish links to other chat networks using a Jabber gateway. It also has no way to access ejabberd’s “send message to all online users” feature (which can be accessed via service discovery), which I need in emergencies at work. It does offer multimedia calls, but that’s about it.

Update: A comment pointed out that Kopete can do service discovery, though it is in a very non-obvious place. However, it still can’t adjust priority when auto-away, so I still can’t use it.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a multiprotocol chat client. I have been avoiding it for years, with the legitimate fear that it was “jack of all trades, master of none.” Last I looked at it, it had the same limitations that Kopete does.

But these days, it is more capable. It supports all those XMPP features. It supports priority dropping by default, and with a plugin, you can even configure all the priority levels just like with Gajim. It also has decent, though not excellent, IRC protocol support.

Pidgin supports account merging — and in fact, it doesn’t support any other mode. You can, for instance, tell it that a given person on IRC is the same as a given Jabber ID. That works, but it’s annoying because you have to manually do it on every machine you’re running Pidgin on. Worse, they used to support a view without merged accounts, but don’t anymore, and they think that’s a feature.

Pidgin does still miss some nifty features that Gajim and Psi both have. Both of those clients will not only tell you that someone is away, but if you hover over their name, tell you how long someone has been away. (Gajim says “away since”, while Pidgin shows “last status at”. Same data either way.) Pidgin has the data to show this, but doesn’t. You can manually find it in the system log if you like, but unhelpfully, it’s not on the log for an individual person.

Also, the Jabber protocol supports notifications while in a chat: “The contact is typing”, paying attention to a conversation, or closed the chat window. Psi and Gajim have configurable support for these; you can send whatever notifications your privacy preferences say. Pidgin, alas, removed that option, and again they see this as a feature.

Pidgin, as a result, makes me rather nervous. They keep removing useful features. What will they remove next?

It is difficult to change colors in Pidgin. It follows the Gtk theme, and there is a special plugin that will override some, but not all, Gtk options.

Empathy

Empathy supports neither priority dropping when away nor service discovery, so it’s not usable for me. Its feature set appears sparse in general, although it has a unique desktop sharing option.

Update: this section added in response to a comment.

On IRC

I also use IRC, and have been using Xchat for that for quite some time now. I tried IRC in Pidgin. It has OK IRC support, but not great. It can automatically identify to nickserv, but it is under-documented and doesn’t support multiple IRC servers for a given network.

I’ve started using xchat with the bip IRC proxy, which makes connecting from multiple machines easier.

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I just read the news that PC Magazine is being canceled. It’s not exactly a shock, given the state of technical magazines right now. I haven’t read one of those in years, since they turned to be more of a consumer than a technical publication.

But I hope I am not the only one out there that remembers PC Magazine from the mid to late 1980s. I had two favorite parts in each issue: the programming example, and the “Abort, Retry, Fail” page at the back of the magazine.

The programming example was usually some sort of DOS (or, on occasion, OS/2) utility. It was usually written in assembly, and would be accompanied by a BASIC program you could type in to get the resulting binary, as assemblers weren’t readily available. The BASIC program was line after line of decimal numbers that would decode them and write out the resulting binary — sort of a primitive uuencode for paper. Trying to type those in gave me some serious eyestrain on more than one occasion. By now, I forget what most of those utilities did, but I remember one: BatchMan. It was a collection of tools for use in DOS batch files, and could do things like display output in color or even — yes — play monophonic music. It came with an example that displayed some lyrics about batch programming on-screen, set to what I later realized was the Batman theme. Geek nirvana, right?

But Batchman was too big to publish the source code, or the BASIC decoder, in print. It might have been one of those things that eventually led me to a CompuServe account. PC Magazine had some deal with CompuServe that you could get their utilities for free, or reduced cost — I forget. CompuServe was probably where I sent my first email, from my account which was 71510,1421 — comma and all. In later years, you could pay a small fee to send email to the Internet, and I had the amazingly attractive email address of 71510.1421@cis.compuserve.com. Take that, gmail.

PC Magazine eventually stopped running utilities that taught people about assembly or batch programming and shifted more to the genre of Windows screensavers. They stopped their articles about how hard disks work and what SCSI is all about, and instead have cover stories like “Vista made easy!” I am, sadly, not making this up. Gone are the days of investigating alternative operating systems like OS/2.

It appears that “Abort, Retry, Fail” is gone, too. It was a one-page thing at the back of each magazine that featured braindead error messages and funny stories about people that did things like FAX an image of a floppy disk to a remote office — before such stories were cliche. Sort of like DailyWTF these days. The sad truth is that the people that would FAX an image of a floppy are probably the ones that are reading PC Magazine today.

I still have a bunch of PC Magazine issues — the good ones — in my parents’ basement. I also still have my floppies with the utilities on them somewhere. One day, when I get some time — I’m estimating this will be about when Jacob goes to college — I’ll go back and take another look at them.

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A lot of people have asked about IPv6 in Debian. There have been some instructions floating around, but all of them I’ve seen are overly complex. Here’s how to set up your own 6to4 tunnel in about 5 minutes (assuming your kernel is IPV6-ready), without the need of freenet6 or any other tunnel broker. You need only a real IP address (static is best) and a basic understanding of IPv6 to proceed. This article will configure your host or your router.

These instructions set you up with 6to4, which requires no outside tunnel broker. However, there are not many 6to4 routers out there. If you are connecting to other non-6to4 sites, chances are god that performance will not be good. This is not a flaw in IPv6 itself. I suggest setting up 6to4 first, since it is fairly easy; once you have it working, then move on to others if you like.

First, you need to obtain an IPV6-ready kernel. I strongly recommend 2.6.1 or above if possible. Check the IPv6 kernel system check page to make sure your kernel is IPV6-ready, and for info on compiling a new kernel if not. In addition to basic IPv6, I also recommend that you compile in IPv6 netfilter support.

Next, you need to add a tunnel to your /etc/network/interfaces file. First, you will need to know your public IP address in IPv4. It will look something like 10.20.30.40. Next, you need to get that in IPv6 notation. Here’s a quick shell script to do that:

#!/bin/sh
printf “2002:%x%02x:%x%02x::\n” `echo $1 | sed ‘s/\./ /g’`

Just run that with your IP address as an argument. In this example, for 10.20.30.40, the result is 2002:a14:1e28::. This is your prefix. All your IP addresses will begin with that. Please see the link above for more on IPv6 addressing if you don’t understand the “::” part of this.

Now, you have all the information to create your own IPv6 tunnel. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and add these lines:

The address line contains the IPv6 address you calculated above, followed by a “2”. The local line contains your local IP address. Now bring up the link with ifup sit1. You should now be able to run ping6 www.ipv6.org and get results back. If you don’t have ping6 on your system, install the iputils-ping package. If this works, add sit1 to the auto line in /etc/network/interfaces.

The /etc/network/ipv6rules.sh is a little script that closes off some ports to your system. If you don’t want to use it, delete that “up” line. Here’s one version that I recommend:

Mind the semicolons (and lack thereof); radvd is picky. Now /etc/init.d/radvd restart and use ps to make sure it’s running. radvd is similar to dhcp for IPv6, but a lot easier.

At this point, your IPv6 network is ready. All clients on your network that are IPv6 capable should automatically assign themselves an IPv6 address and be ready to go. For Debian clients, all you need is IPv6 support in your kernel; you do not need to do anything on them at all.